Call to Action! Don't Do This!

I wanted to write this post because I spent a fair amount of time last night working on figuring out how I could add Call to Action strategies to my website targeting potential WA members. My niche website has nothing to do with building an online business or earning passive income from affiliate marketing. In spite of this I am hell bent on finding a crafty way to connect with readers in this direction. What I ended up deciding to do was to pose my call to action phrases in the form of questions. For example: Do You Have a Passion......Find out more? Do You Want to... Go Here??? and so forth. I was pretty proud of myself last night thinking I had come up with a great way to connect with folks who are surely out there looking for this sort of thing to take the call to action.

After sleeping on it and looking over my questions today, I began to feel like it isn't going to work.

As a coincidence (or maybe not), I went to visit my mother this evening and there was a book there called Tales From Kentucky Lawyers by William Lynwood Montell. While perusing through the book, I ran across one story called "Jury Trial Over Ear That was Bitten Off" The lawyer telling the story was named Stan Billingsly, date- March 20, 2001.

The story was in sync with a common code lawyers are taught in law school which is: Don't ever ask a question you don't know the answer to". Also, a well known Harper Lee-(To Kill A Mockingbird) quote as follows:

"Never, never, never, on cross-examination ask a witness a question you don't already know the answer to, was a tenet, I absorbed with my baby-food."

The prime example of this in the story told in the book "Tales from Kentucky Lawyers" was about a defendant in a case involving a maiming. He was charged with biting the victim's ear off in a barroom fight (No, it wasn't Mike Tyson) ;-) The defense attorney asked the witness "Did you actually see him bite off the victim's ear?" The prosecution witness replied that he had not actually seen the defendant bite the ear off.

The defense attorney should have shut up at that point! But, instead he was so full of himself based on the answer from the first question, he turned to the jury and loudly shouted with raised arms, "Well, if you didn't see him bite off the ear, just what did you see?"

To which the prosecution's witness replied "I saw him spit it out".

Oops! Obviously, in this true case example, the defense lawyer was expecting the prosecuting witness to have no comeback and he was wrong, and lost the case.

My simple point for relaying this story: If your readers are not responding to your call to action then find out the answer to the questions (WHY?) or don't bother asking!

The story might be a bit of an extreme example but it resonated with me and reminded me again that I should be better focused on strategies that are both meaningful and impactful to my reader. No taking my readers for granted, assuming I know what the answers to my own questions will be without doing my research.

I was also reminded after going back through some of the courses here today along with reading some new stuff I hadn't read before from Kyle and a few others that these answers are all here for us. Don't forget this like I was doing! Pay attention, review the course work more than once if you have to.

Get the answers down first then you can confidently ask for calls to action.

Thanks for bearing with me and my two cents contribution.